Boeing employees don’t trust senior leadership and don’t feel their contributions are recognized or valued, according to the results of an internal survey that CEO Kelly Ortberg shared at staff meetings this week.

The company is seeing improvement in its production process, Ortberg said, something that it has been striving for since a safety incident in January 2024 when a panel blew off a 737 Max 9 plane midflight.

But it still has work to do on its goal of changing company culture. Only 27% of survey participants said they would highly recommend Boeing as a place to work.

“I look at this as an opportunity for us to really understand what it is we need to do … to improve the culture of the company,” Ortberg told managers at a meeting on Wednesday.

“When we (improve the culture), people are going to be more motivated,” he continued. “Good things happen. People enjoy coming to work. And so as leaders of the company, it’s really up to us to make that happen, enable that in the organization.”

It’s not the first time Ortberg, who became CEO in August, has called on leaders to make changes and set the tone for a companywide culture shift.

At an all-hands meeting last month Ortberg said initial survey feedback showed Boeing management needs to shape up and spend more time listening to front-line employees. He said at the time that Boeing would put an action plan in place to address those concerns.

On Wednesday, he told managers he “suspected” employee feedback would be “brutal to the leadership of the company, and it met those expectations.”

The manager meeting, which was open to 15,000 leaders at all levels of the company, came one day before a virtual companywide gathering to discuss the results of the internal survey and outline new company values. Excerpts of Ortberg’s comments and meeting materials were shared with The Seattle Times by a person who attended Wednesday’s meeting.

Here’s what Ortberg had to say.

‘Give a damn!’

Ortberg shared five new values the company plans to adopt: Safety and quality, people focus, trust, ownership and innovation.

A group of 40 employees, dubbed the Culture Working Group, helped craft those values with input from the employee survey. Ten of those workers are based in the Puget Sound region.

Each of those values has associated behaviors, according to the copy of the meeting presentation shared with The Seattle Times.

To uphold the value of safety and quality, Boeing must “respect the consequences of our work,” the presentation said.

For the value of “people focus,” Boeing’s workforce must “ask for help and give it freely.” For innovation, Boeing must “do cool things” and for trust, it must “do the right thing.”

When it comes to ownership, Boeing must be accountable and decisive, pursue excellence and “give a damn!”

Ortberg told managers he wasn’t “real comfortable” with the phrasing of that last one but after three attempts to soften the language, the group tasked with spearheading Boeing’s culture change insisted it was the best way to get the message across.

Those five values will replace Boeing’s current set of principles put in place by former CEO Dave Calhoun, who took over after two fatal Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 and then stepped down after the panel blowout last year.

In this year’s employee survey, 54% of respondents said they feel inspired by Boeing’s current values, which include engineering excellence, accountability and rewarding predictability and stability.

The current values also focus on applying “lean principles,” referring to a manufacturing philosophy that strives to eliminate waste and maximize productivity, and a directive to “crush bureaucracy.”

Asked to rank what values are crucial to the company’s future success, more than 20,000 employees named “trust, transparency and integrity” as the number one priority. That was followed by quality and then accountability.

One survey respondent wrote that Boeing needs to “hold people accountable — there are no consequences for poor performance or undesirable actions.”

Collaboration was at the bottom of employee’s crucial values, followed by “crushing bureaucracy.”

Most survey respondents said they believe the company needs to “better demonstrate our values through actions,” according to the presentation.

‘We’re not holding our breath’

Eighty-two percent of Boeing’s workforce took the survey in mid-February, the highest participation in an employee questionnaire since 2016, according to the meeting presentation.

It found that employees’ company pride had dropped significantly — 91% of participants in a 2013 survey said they were proud to work at Boeing, while 67% of participants in this year’s survey said the same.

The survey also found employees often trust their direct managers but don’t have as much confidence in senior leaders.

One respondent wrote that “senior leadership should do more to understand why things are not working,” according to the presentation shared with managers Wednesday.

Another said Boeing should encourage leaders to focus on “clear guidance and team empowerment over micromanagement.”

Ortberg told managers that “less than half” of employees are confident in senior leadership’s ability to make decisions, communicate direction and respond to concerns.

“I can tell you, as the leader of the company, this is something that I take very personally and we’ve really, really got to take this head on,” Ortberg said. “There is absolutely no way we are going to get the culture of the company where we want if you don’t have confidence in senior leadership.”

For some employees, Ortberg’s message this week and over his first nine months as CEO has inspired optimism in the company’s future success. But, even with that positive outlook, the talk of “culture change” can ring hollow.

“I think a lot of it is a sales pitch,” said one engineer based in California who asked to remain anonymous to protect their job. “We hear the same message all the time (but) it’s all different between what you say you’re going to do and what the actual action is.

“I feel like everyone’s kind of optimistic, but we’re not holding our breath, either.”

On Wednesday, Ortberg issued another call to action to Boeing’s leaders. “I think you’re going to be shocked that if we could get 160,000 people rowing this boat in the same direction how far we can go,” he said. “So let’s try to do that as a leadership team.”

The meeting presentation directed managers to reflect on the survey results, thank employees for their feedback and “select one thing you can and will do better for your team.”

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